Wednesday, May 05, 2010

WAKE THE WORKERS

Our pal Faux Smoke sent us this story and pic of Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their work stations from exhaustion. It comes from the London Daily Mail which calls the photo “an image that Microsoft won't want the world to see.” The mills may not be dark, but they’re still fucking satanic. Of course, the Daily Mail isn’t the most super-reliable of tabloids, but this would seem to be a fair indictment of routine capitalism (and whatever the hell China is) in action. Which leads us to one manifest conclusion. There’s an absolute ungency for one big, powerful, IWW-style global labor union. But they’ll kill a lot of us before they let that happen.

“Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86f heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks. For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for the American multinational computer company. This photo and others like it were smuggled out of the KYE Systems factory at Dongguan, China, as part of a three-year investigation by the National Labour Committee, a human rights organisation which campaigns for workers across the globe. The mostly female workers, aged 18 to 25, work from 7.45am to 10.55pm, sometimes with 1,000 workers crammed into one 105ft by 105ft room. They are not allowed to talk or listen to music, are forced to eat substandard meals from the factory cafeterias, have no bathroom breaks during their shifts and must clean the toilets as discipline, according to the NLC. The workers also sleep on site, in factory dormitories, with 14 workers to a room. They must buy their own mattresses and bedding, or else sleep on 28in-wide plywood boards. They 'shower' with a sponge and a bucket. And many of the workers, because they are young women, are regularly sexually harassed, the NLC claimed.” (Click here for more.)